Teardrop

3 EVACUATION

Eureka touched the corners of her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. She blinked and remembered the last time she had cried—

It was the night before Hurricane Rita devastated New Iberia. On a warm, damp evening in late September, a few weeks after Katrina, the hurricane hit their town … and the frail levees in Eureka’s parents’ marriage finally flooded, too.

Eureka was nine. She’d spent an uneasy summer in the care of one parent at a time. If Diana took her fishing, she would disappear into the bedroom as soon as they got home, leaving Dad to scale and fry the fish. If Dad got movie tickets, Diana found other plans and someone else to take her seat.

Earlier summers of the three of them sailing around Cypremort Point, with Dad tucking State Fair cotton candy into Eureka’s and Diana’s mouths, seemed like a dream Eureka could barely remember. That summer, the only thing her parents did together was fight.

The big one had been brewing for months. Her parents always argued in the kitchen. Something about Dad’s calmness there as he stirred and simmered complex reductions seemed to ignite Diana. The hotter things got between them, the more of Dad’s kitchenware she broke. She’d mangled his meat grinder and bent the pasta rollers. By the time Hurricane Rita hit town, there were only three whole plates left in the cupboard.

The rain grew heavy around nightfall, but it wasn’t heavy enough to drown out the fighting downstairs. This one had started when a friend of Diana’s had offered them a ride in the van she was driving toward Houston. Diana wanted to evacuate; Dad wanted to ride out the storm. They’d had the same kind of fight fifty times, under hurricane and cloudless skies. Eureka alternated between burrowing her face in a pillow and pressing her ear against the wall to hear what her parents were saying.

She heard her mother’s voice: “You think the worst of everyone!”

And Dad: “At least I think at all!”

Then came the sound of glass shattering against the tile floor of the kitchen. A sharp, briny odor carried upstairs and Eureka knew Diana had broken the jars of okra Dad was pickling on the windowsill. She heard curse words, then more crashing. Wind wailed outside the house. Hail rattled the windows.

“I won’t just sit here!” Diana cried. “I won’t wait to drown!”

“Look outside,” Dad said. “You can’t go now. It would be worse to leave.”

“Not for me. Not for Eureka.”

Dad was quiet. Eureka could picture him eyeing his wife, who would be boiling in a way he’d never let his sauces boil. He always told Eureka the only heat to use when you loved a sauce was the softest simmer. But Diana was never one to be tempered.

“Just say it!” she shouted.

“You’d want to go even if there was no hurricane,” he said. “You run. It’s who you are. But you can’t disappear. You have a daughter—”

“I’ll take Eureka.”

“You have me.” Dad’s voice shook.

Diana didn’t respond. The lights flickered off, then on, then off for good.

Just outside Eureka’s bedroom door, there was a landing that looked down on the kitchen. She crept from her room and gripped the railing. She watched her parents light candles and shout about whose fault it was they didn’t have more. When Diana placed a candlestick on the mantel, Eureka noticed the floral suitcase, packed, at the foot of the stairs.

Diana had made up her mind to evacuate before this fight had even started.

If her father stayed and her mother left, what would happen to Eureka? No one had told her to pack.

She hated when her mother went away for a weeklong archaeological dig. This seemed different, bathed in a sickly glow of forever. She sank to her knees and leaned her forehead against the banister. A tear slid down her cheek. Alone at the top of the stairs, Eureka let out a painful sob.

An explosion of breaking glass sounded above her. She ducked and covered her head. Peeking through her fingers, she saw that the wind had pushed the elbow of a large branch from the oak tree in the backyard through the second-story window. Glass rained on her hair. Water streamed through the gash in the pane. The back of Eureka’s cotton nightgown was soaked.

“Eureka!” Dad shouted, running up the stairs. But before he could reach her, there was an odd creaking from the hallway below. As her father spun to locate it, Eureka watched the door to the water heater closet burst from its hinges.

A vast swell of water gushed from inside the small closet. The wooden door spun onto its side like a raft riding a wave. It took Eureka a moment to realize that the water tank had split down its center, that its contents were making a giant bathtub out of the hallway. Pipes hissed streams across the walls, twisting like garter snakes as they spewed. Water drenched the carpet, sloshed against the bottom step in the stairwell. The force of the spill tipped over kitchen chairs. One of them tripped Diana, who’d been moving toward Eureka, too.

“It’s only going to get worse,” Diana shouted at her husband. She pushed away the chair and righted herself. When she looked at Eureka, a strange expression crossed her face.

Dad had made it halfway up the stairs. His gaze darted between his daughter and the gushing water tank, as if he didn’t know what to attend to first. When the water thrust the busted closet door into the coffee table in the living room, the shattering of glass made Eureka jump. Dad shot Diana a hateful look that crossed the space between them like lightning.

“I told you we should have called a real plumber instead of your idiot brother!” He flung a hand up toward Eureka, whose wailing had deepened into a hoarse moan. “Comfort her.”

But Diana had already pushed past her husband on the stairs. She swept Eureka into her arms, brushed the glass from her hair, and carried her back to her bedroom, away from the window and the invading tree. Diana’s feet left soggy footprints on the carpet. Her face and clothes were drenched. She sat Eureka on the old four-poster bed and gripped her shoulders roughly. Wild intensity filled her eyes.

Eureka sniffed. “I’m scared.”

Diana gazed at her daughter as if she didn’t know who she was. Then her palm flicked backward and she slapped Eureka, hard.

Eureka froze mid-moan, too stunned to move or breathe. The whole house seemed to reverberate, echoing the slap. Diana leaned close. Her eyes bored into her daughter’s. She said in the gravest tone Eureka had ever heard: “Never, ever cry again.”